Programs

Most famous for her seminal novel The Color Purple, writer/activist Alice Walker celebrates her 70th birthday. Born February 9, 1944, into a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, she came of age during the violent racism and seismic social changes of mid-20th-century America. Her mother, poverty and participation in the civil rights movement were the formative influences on her consciousness, becoming the inherent themes in her writing. The first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Walker continues to shine a light on global human rights issues. Her dramatic life is told with poetry and lyricism, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover, Quincy Jones, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Sapphire and Walker herself. Thursday, February 13 at 8:00 pm

The dome that crowns Florence’s great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—the Duomo—is a towering masterpiece of Renaissance ingenuity and an enduring source of mystery. Still the largest masonry dome on earth after more than six centuries, it is taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs as much as an average cruise ship. Historians and engineers have long debated how its secretive architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, managed to keep the dome perfectly aligned and symmetrical as the sides rose and converged toward the center, 40 stories above the cathedral floor. To test the latest theories, a team of U.S. master bricklayers will help build a unique experimental model Duomo using period tools and techniques. Will it stay intact during the final precarious stages of closing over the top of the dome? Wednesday, February 12 at 8:00 pm.

Here's a highlight reel of my best aurora nights in 2013, including THE best St. Patrick's Day aurora display. That was an epic night in Alaska with an EPIC FLIGHT to the stars! 2014 has great potential. We are still in the peak phase of the solar cycle and on any given night, predicted or not predicted, there can be a light show that will set you free.

Long before Paul Newman and Robert Redford immortalized them on screen, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid captivated Americans from coast to coast. In the 1890s, their exploits robbing banks and trains in the West -- and then seemingly vanishing into thin air -- became national news and the basis of rumors and myth. But who were Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh? How did they come together to form the Wild Bunch gang? And how did they manage to pull off the longest string of successful holdups in history while eluding the Pinkertons, the nation’s most feared detective force? Separating fact from fiction, the latest installment of The Wild West collection explores the last pair of outlaws to flee on horseback into a setting sun. Tuesday, February 11 at 8:00 pm

On April 28, 1881, 21-year-old Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, just days from being hanged for murder, outfoxed his jailors and electrified the nation with the latest in a long line of daring escapes. Just a few weeks later, the notorious young outlaw was gunned down by an ambitious sheriff. The Kid was soon mythologized by a never-ending stream of dime-store romances and later, big-screen dramas. But in all the narratives, Billy the Kid’s real story has been obscured. This program deconstructs the mythology surrounding the infamous desperado. Tuesday, February 11 at 7:00 pm.

Artists love to exchange their wares with fellow craftsmen. I still have chimes my older daughter, Jenn, made in kindergarten almost forty years ago. So when my friend Lawrence Vescera mailed me his sci-fi tome, Kiss It All Goodbye, I was thrilled to turn off reruns of The Borgias, pour some tea and begin the enchantment while forgetting icy roads outside my cozy nook. Read more.

My friend Laura asked me to make her new little one a tiny football hat. I was definitely up to the challenge. I was surprised how few knitted patterns there were floating around Pinterest. Most of the patterns are crochet, which can be made very quickly, but for a football hat I think knit has more room for detail. Read more.

Based on the novel by celebrated writer Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), this is the story of the educated but penniless Emily (Lydia Wilson). During her duties as a lady’s companion for Lady Maria (Joanna Lumley), she meets her employer’s wealthy widower nephew, Lord James Walderhurst (Linus Roache). Accepting his practical if unromantic marriage proposal, Emily finds solace in the company of Walderhurst’s nephew Alec Osborn (James D’Arcy) and his glamorous wife, Hester (Hasina Haque), after Lord James leaves to rejoin his regiment. Emily, alone with the Osborns, increasingly comes under their control. She begins to fear for her life. Sunday, February 9 at 9:00 pm.

The film reveals the full scope of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a secret spy agency formed by the state to preserve segregation during the 1950s and ‘60s. Granted broad powers, this commission used its network of informants to spy on over 87,000 Americans as it covered up violence and murder in order to preserve the status quo and derail the civil rights movement. Monday, February 10 at 9:00 pm